Timeless literature: 3 contemporary works poised to become future classics

Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is a classic that will endure even after decades. This English translation by Deepa Bhasthi of select short stories by Mushtaq was awarded the International Booker Prize this year. Heart Lamp is not only the first translation from Kannada, but also the first short story collection ever, to win this award. The recognition has given a global platform to Mushtaq’s powerful and humane prose.

The stories describe with warmth and humanity the everyday lives of Muslim women in south Karnataka. The language is colloquial and full of feeling, containing desire, ambition, the joys and sorrows of children, the implacable force of family. While rooted in its specific social setting, Mushtaq’s writing is universal and speaks against injustice. Fiction is only one dimension of her commitment to positive social change. In her life as a journalist, activist, lawyer, municipal council member, and convenor of the Bandaya (protest) literary movement, Mushtaq has always demonstrated a belief in thoughtful, constructive, and empathetic action.

Heart Lamp is rich, textured, and profoundly affecting. The stories are brilliant with imagery even as they speak truth to power. They give voice to those who are rarely heard: older women, poor relatives, those at the margins. The elderly, the weak, the forgotten. When they do speak, it is with powerful simplicity; occasionally, with flashes of defiance. In a brief but illuminating exchange, in a tiny village of less than a hundred homes, an elderly tailor challenges a grandmother with a question that reaches across the entire universe: “Do you know, Jamaal Bi, why this whole world, the sun, the moon, the sky and stars have been created?” The senior lady rebukes him: “Philosophy is not your exclusive property.” This moment recalls William Blake’s image of seeing the world in a grain of sand.

As Mushtaq said in her Booker acceptance speech, “No story is ever small... in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole.”

— Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, IAS officer

As the year 2025 came to an end, I stood listening to the Kunthipuzha River as she made her way across the heart of Kerala’s Silent Valley National Park, and thought about the many people who have protected it for decades, and that’s when Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? came to my mind.

“Our fate flows with that of the river — and always has,” he writes in what is, perhaps, one of his most personal books yet. It’s the book I have kept by my writing desk, not only because it’s beautifully written and produced with the most stunning end papers, but because it’s a story I keep returning to.

The author embarks upon three journeys — to Ecuador, India, and Canada — bookended by a homecoming to his local chalk stream in Cambridge in the U.K. The prose crackles, as alive as the rivers he meets. Macfarlane paints a vivid and respectful picture of water people, as well as the spaces where these awe-inspiring waterbodies dwell, while underscoring the socio-political landscape that attempts to bend these rivers.

These riverine stories are not limited to their geographies, the narratives resonate across the planet, championing life-giving waterbodies everywhere.

— Bijal Vachharajani, children’s book author and editor

Back when I read it in July, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t come across a braver or more heartbreaking book in 2025. And I was right. Zara Chowdhary’s memoir The Lucky Ones was published a whole year before I read it but its urgency and relevance only grew in that period — as I believe it will continue to, as the world grapples with unchecked majoritarianism.

The Lucky Ones is one of a handful of books on the Gujarat riots of 2002, but stands apart in its framing through the lens of a Muslim family as it slowly unravels in the run-up to, during, and in the aftermath of the violence. Startlingly well-written for a debut work, intimate, bold, unapologetic and deeply empathetic, The Lucky Ones makes us remember that which too many want to forget.

— Sumana Mukherjee, writer and editor

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